Papers by Nan Lu
WhiteningBERT: An Easy Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Approach (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models perform well on learning sentence semantics when fine-tuned with supervised data. |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough examination of pretrained model based unsupervised sentence embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on whitening-based vector normalization with less than 10 lines of code. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Long-Range Modeling of Source Code Files with eWASH: Extended Window Access by Syntax Hierarchy (2021.emnlp-main)
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Colin Clement, Shuai Lu, Xiaoyu Liu, Michele Tufano, Dawn Drain, Nan Duan, Neel Sundaresan, Alexey Svyatkovskiy
| Challenge: | Statistical language modeling and translation with transformers have found many successful applications in program understanding and generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture-independent approach for leveraging syntactic hierarchies of source code . they use syntax trees to extract syntak hierarchical structures and integrate them into context window . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art in code completion and summarization for Python in the CodeXGLUE benchmark. |
Prompt Space Optimizing Few-shot Reasoning Success with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that uses text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition and constructs a space for representing all prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. |
ReACC: A Retrieval-Augmented Code Completion Framework (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that statistical language modeling with transformers can greatly improve the performance in code completion tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented code completion framework that combines a source code retriever and an auto-regressive language model for programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on CodeXGLUE benchmark. |
RATE-Nav: Region-Aware Termination Enhancement for Zero-shot Object Navigation with Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Object navigation is a fundamental task in embodied artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a region-aware Termination-Enhanced method that incorporates visual language models and exploration rates to enable efficient termination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a success rate of 67.8% and an SPL of 31.3% on the HM3D dataset. |
Constructing Multilingual Code Search Dataset Using Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for code search are monolingual, but their query data are only in English. |
| Approach: | They construct a multilingual code search dataset in four natural and four programming languages using a neural machine translation model and apply back-translation data filtering to it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model pre-trained with all natural and programming language data performs best under almost all settings. |
Code Execution with Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Chenxiao Liu, Shuai Lu, Weizhu Chen, Daxin Jiang, Alexey Svyatkovskiy, Shengyu Fu, Neel Sundaresan, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Pre-trained code intelligence models ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures to understand code execution. |
| Approach: | They develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a Python dataset and task for code execution that challenges existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on code execution and shows its potential for zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to code generation. |
UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models for programming languages have demonstrated great success on code intelligence . however, such pre-tried models are sub-optimal for auto-regressive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming language that leverages cross-module contents like AST and code comment to enhance code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on most code-related tasks and compares with existing models on zero-shot code-to-code search. |
Uncovering Main Causalities for Long-tailed Information Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural information from unstructured texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to uncover the main causalities behind data in the view of causal inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect the main causalities behind data in the view of causal inference. |
Enhancing Large Language Models in Coding Through Multi-Perspective Self-Consistency (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work utilizes verification properties to verify and re-rank solutions in a majority voting manner, but this assumption may not hold. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective self-consistency framework that incorporates both inter- and intra-consistency across outputs from multiple perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts performance of foundation models on various benchmarks, including HumanEval (+15.91%), MBPP (+6.43%) and CodeContests (+9.37%). |
Fair Abstractive Summarization of Diverse Perspectives (2024.naacl-long)
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Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Junru Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Xiaoxin Lu, Caiming Xiong, Jieyu Zhao, Dragomir Radev, Kathleen McKeown, Rui Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on summarization metrics and large language models has not explored fair abstractive summarizing. |
| Approach: | They propose four reference-free automatic metrics to measure the differences between target and source perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods alleviate fair abstractive summarization on user-generated data. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction capture non-local interactions but are not able to capture rich non-linguistic interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that empowers relational reasoning across sentences by automatically inducing the latent document- level graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F1 score of 59.05 on a large-scale document-level dataset (DocRED), significantly improving over the previous results. |
SimANS: Simple Ambiguous Negatives Sampling for Dense Text Retrieval (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Kun Zhou, Yeyun Gong, Xiao Liu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yelong Shen, Anlei Dong, Jingwen Lu, Rangan Majumder, Ji-rong Wen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sapping negatives from large document pool suffer from the uninformative or false negative problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to sample negatives from a large document pool using a new sampling probability distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to sample more ambiguous negatives on four public and one industry datasets. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Selene: Pioneering Automated Proof in Software Verification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, software verification is resource-intensive and manpower-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a project-level automated proof benchmark based on the seL4 operating system . they propose augmentations to enhance the flexibility of the framework and lightweight verification environment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a comprehensive framework for end-to-end proof generation and a lightweight verification environment. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
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Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
Streaming Hallucination Detection in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haolang Lu, Minghui Pan, Ripeng LI, Guoshun Nan, Jialin Zhuang, Zijie Zhao, Zhongxiang Sun, Kun Wang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance of large language models, yet hallucinations in such settings often emerge subtly and propagate across reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat step-level hallucination judgments as local observations and introduce a cumulative prefix-level signal that tracks the global evolution of the reasoning state over the entire trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables streaming hallucination detection in long CoT reasoning, providing real-time, interpretable evidence. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
Intervention-Based Alignment of Code Search with Execution Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing code search training datasets approximate text-code co-occurrences as positive execution feedback, but this approximation may misalign models’ retrieval decisions from ground-truth correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose a code intervention-based reinforcement learning approach that perturbs training code to result in misalignment, then tests models’ decisions and corrects them with the execution feedback by reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method induces the execution feedback from perturbation, without actual execution, and then tests models’ decisions and corrects them with the execution input by reinforcement learning. |
Towards Compositional Generalization in Code Search (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing code search models that focus on code as an unstructured sequence fail to generalize when the lexical perturbation without changing structures and labels is applied in test codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional generalization model that extracts structural elements and a code template that targets compositional genericization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is complementary to flow graphs in GraphCodeBERT, by enhancing structural context around variables. |
AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wanjun Zhong, Ruixiang Cui, Yiduo Guo, Yaobo Liang, Shuai Lu, Yanlin Wang, Amin Saied, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Traditional benchmarks for evaluating foundation models often fail to accurately represent their general abilities for human-centric tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual benchmark to assess foundation models in the context of human-centric standardized exams such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, and math competitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds the average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions with 95% accuracy and 92.5% on the Chinese college entrance English exam. |
Beyond Query Bias: Candidate-Aware Iterative Refinement for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve target images suffer from inherent cognitive bias due to unknown candidate distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that reframes ZS-CIR as a self-correcting process . they propose to use retrieved results as feedback to perceive the candidate distribution . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on public benchmarks show that CoRR outperforms other SOTA methods. |
Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yufei Wang, Yuanhao Xi, Jianqiao Lu, Huan Zhang, Nan Hu, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use across six key tasks in three stages . they also build VirtualMobile – an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates 13 open- and closed-source LLMs and provides detailed analysis at each stage. |
Competition-Level Problems are Effective LLM Evaluators (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiming Huang, Zhenghao Lin, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shuai Lu, Fangyu Lei, Yaobo Liang, Yelong Shen, Chen Lin, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about their capabilities and the potential data contamination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in solving recent competition-level programming problems in Codeforces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has experienced a cliff-like decline in problems after September 2021, which shows the potential data contamination and the challenges for any existing LLM to solve unseen complex reasoning problems. |
TED-TTS: Training-Free Intra-Utterance Emotion and Duration Control for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing controllable Text-to-Speech methods limited to inter-utterance-level control . utterance expressiveness remains a challenge in building human-like TTS synthesis systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency while maintaining baseline-level speech quality. |
Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is effective for closed-ended tasks, but it is not applicable to open-ended social language games. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a time-scaled evolutionary perception mechanism to detect impasse by quantifying dual-scale value baseline divergence alongside match entropy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple social language games show that the proposed method outperforms baselines and avoids policy degeneration. |